Release notes

Version 0.8.2

Fix man pages: the -D option of the solstice CLI was wrongly documented. The
zenith and elevation angles were sometimes inverted.

Bump version of the StarSP dependency to 0.8.

Version 0.8.1

Fix the VTK of the receiver map: the receiver map was written as double
while the type notified in the VTK file was float. This might produce
errors on loading of the resulting VTK file. The VTK data type is now set to
double to make it consistent with the type of the written values.

Version 0.8

Add the support of per-triangle absorbed flux density. The per_primitive
attribute of the receiver file format controls which flux densities to output
for each triangle of a receiver. Its value can be:

NONE: no per-triangle flux density is computed, i.e. no receiver map is
output for the receiver. It was the comportment of the previous version of
Solstice when the per_primitive flag was undefined or was set to 0.

INCOMING: output the estimate of the per-triangle incoming flux density.
It was the comportment of the previous version of Solstice when the
per_primitive flag was set to 1.

ABSORBED: output the estimate of the per-triangle absorbed flux density.

INCOMING_AND_ABSORBED: output both the estimates of incoming and absorbed
flux density for each triangle of the receiver.

Version 0.7.1

Replace the roughness parameter of the mirror material by the
slope_error parameter.

Improve the documentation of the sun direction.

Ensure that the per-receiver results are sorted according to the order of the
receivers as listed in the submitted receiver file.

Version 0.7

Add the gaussian sun shape.

Add the microfacet attribute to the mirror material. It controls the normal
distribution of the microfacets when the mirror roughness is not null. The
supported distributions are BECKMANN and PILLBOX.

Version 0.6.1

Fix the solstice-input man page. The extinction parameter of the medium and
the atmosphere was named absorption.

Rename the pillbox theta_max parameter in half_angle.

Version 0.6

Rename the absorption parameter of the medium and the atmosphere in
extinction.

Fix the distribution of the pillbox sun: the pdf was wrong and its angular
parameter was internally used as an angular diameter while it is a angular
radius.

Fix the solver for non parallel sun: the angle between the principal sun
direction and the sampled direction was not correctly taken into account
leading to a wrong initial weight for the optical paths.

Fix the solver with shapes having perturbed normals: perturbed normals
must be taken into account in the bounces of the optical paths only, not in
the energy computations.

Version 0.5

Improve the performances of the solver up to 50% in situations where the
radiative random walks bounce on many surfaces.

Version 0.4.1

Update the name of the output data in the solstice-output man page.

Fix an issue in "dump geometry" mode, i.e. option -g. Solstice might fail
to export the solar plant geometry due to a wrong constraint on the pivots.

Version 0.4

Update the color of the paths output with the -p option. A path is blue,
turquoise or yellow if it reaches a receiver, misses the receivers or is
occluded before it reaches a primary reflector, respectively.

Add a new type of paths tracked with the -p option: a path is red if it
travels unforeseen mediums.

Correctly handle the stacks parameter of the cylinder.

Version 0.3

Fix several issues in the output results. Refer to the Solsice-Solver 0.3
release notes for more informations.

Add the --version option.

Update the man pages to fix some issues and improve the output documentation.

Version 0.2.3

Update the solstice-input file format. The anchor and entity name cannot
contain spaces or tabulations anymore.

Fix the reported sun directions in the solstice-output. For each submitted
sun direction, solstice correctly output its Cartesian coordinates but always
wrote the azimuthal and elevation angles of the first direction.

Update the solstice-output map page: add the missing <efficiency> grammar
rule and fix the definition of the <map-side-data> grammar rule.

Version 0.2.2

Fix how the AsciiDoc tool suite is looking for on Windows; it was never found
and consequently the documentation was not generated.

Version 0.2.1

Fix the install target on Windows: copy the solstice runtime libraries in the
solstice installation path.

Version 0.2

Add the support of an optional normal map to the materials. It defines
spatially varying normals in the tangent space of the surface. Currently,
only the quadric surfaces are parameterizable: using a normal mapped material
on the other shapes will produce unforeseen behaviors.

Add the support of spectral data to the materials: a material attribute can be
either a scalar or follow a spectral distribution.

Add an optional atmospheric absorption after the first reflection of the light
path; the sun description includes the atmospheric effect before the first
reflector.

Write the man pages of the Solstice command line and its associated file
formats.